Believe it or not, I am actually writing a GG blog which is not about Ecstasy Motion!!!

The subject of this one is near and dear to my heart, however. Little Known Fact: In a past life, before I switched careers into game programming, I actually received a Bachelor's degree in Geography from the University of Oregon.

I have always liked maps, and have always wanted to take on the problem of importing real life terrain into Torque. I have played around with it multiple times, but have always been stopped by the sheer volume of the data, as well as the lack of an infinite terrain paging system in Torque.

A few weekends ago, I decided it was time to quit playing around and really dig in.




Above is the first video demonstrating the Terrain Master in action. I won't go into an incredible amount of detail here, because I just did so in this readme file... check it out if you want to see all the details.

In short, what this project offers is two distinct services: A) it imports very large terrain datasets, stored in raw binary matrix form as exported by the free program 3DEM, and saves them as a grid of .ter files, and B) it pages through these files as the player or free camera moves around the world.

The dataset I'm using here represents a squarish area about 50 km on a side, covering the southern end of Oregon's Willamette Valley. I created this dataset by downloading 24 DEM files from a website called GeoCommunity (geocomm.com). See the readme above for complete instructions, but to make a long story short, I loaded all 24 DEM files into 3DEM, exported the data to a binary floating point matrix file, and then accessed that file to make the set of .ter files.

From that point, the files still have no lightmaps, normals, textures, or anything else to make them interesting. This is where L3DT comes in. Many Torque users should be familiar with this app, it is a lifesaver - although one of my biggest problems at the moment is getting the time to figure out how to script it or write a plugin for it that can process all of these files as a batch... but I get ahead of myself.



Above is the final image of the entire region included by my Terrain Master test project. You can download these terrains from BAG at the following URL:

SouthernWillamette.zip

If you download the whole project and try to use it, (read the readme first!!!) you will find yourself starting in the lower left corner of that map.

http://github.com/ChrisCalef/T3DTerrainMaster

Good luck, and happy mapping!


(But here's one more video of it in action, just for good measure)